The Benevolent Protective Empire of Ormea is a gargantuan, cultured nation, ruled by Vilhelmo la Unua with a fair hand, and renowned for its multi-spousal wedding ceremonies, compulsory military service, and stringent health and safety legislation. The compassionate, democratic population of 21.05 billion Ormeans are free to do what they want with their own bodies, and vote for whomever they like in elections; if they go into business, however, they are regulated to within an inch of their lives.

The government — a sprawling, bureaucracy-choked, liberal morass — juggles the competing demands of Education, Healthcare, and Environment. It meets to discuss matters of state in the capital city of Palacaurbo. The average income tax rate is 83.0%, and even higher for the wealthy.

The strong Ormean economy, worth a remarkable 1,241 trillion Commonwealth Crowns a year, is extremely specialized and mostly made up of the Book Publishing industry, with significant contributions from Information Technology. State-owned companies are reasonably common. Average income is 58,981 Commonwealth Crowns, and distributed extremely evenly, with practically no difference between the richest and poorest citizens.

Sniffer dogs are trained to follow clouds of fruity-smelling vapor, voting for pro-Bigtopian candidates is voluntary, politicians who misplace decimal points on expense reports are fired for gross incompetence, and every week is blindness awareness week. Crime, especially youth-related, is totally unknown, thanks to a well-funded police force and progressive social policies in education and welfare. Ormea's national animal is the ridgebacked lemur, which frolics freely in the nation's many lush forests.

Ormea is ranked 97,267^th in the world and 5,039^th in Balder for Most Scientifically Advanced, scoring 87.09 on the Kurzweil Singularity Index.